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I’m 8 years old. It’s breakfast time, and I want another scone. Mom says no, I get upset, I’m sent to my room. I break the drywall above my bed with my head. It’s my first day in a new school. I’m awkward, timid, reserved: fresh meat. A belligerent classmate dares me to say ‘Fuck.’ I try to ignore him; silence is the easiest form of resistance. He persists until the teacher comes in. It means nothing to him. It stains the rest of my day. I’ve just had a small tiff with my girlfriend and I’m pissed and sulky. My friends and I are going out. In the stairwell one of them throws a friendly taunt. I grab his throat and trap him against the wall for a split second before my senses return. I’m falling asleep next to my S.O. My hand creeps up and rests over her breast, just rests. It feels good to have someone to hold. I’m walking to the museum with my country-mouse cousin. In the big city I feel especially protective. A solicitor comes up and presses a newspaper on us, insistent. I lash out and slap it out of his hand. We need to talk about our boys. Modern masculinity is failing us. Truth be told it was never really functional, but recently it seems to be exploding in a particularly spectacular fashion. We’re constantly dodging blazing pieces of manliness’s wreckage as they fall to earth. This debris takes a variety of forms—Trump, Weinstein, frat hazing, and the plague of mass shootings, to name a few—but they all come from one source. Something is rotten in the heart of America, and it’s our definition of what it means to be a man. It posits an unreachable Adonis, assertive and brusquely uncompromising, with eight-pack abs that bring the ladies like a siren’s call, and fails to recognize what’s missing from that portrait. It obsesses over mastery of your domain, focuses on the façade, and rejects essential internal self-care as a sign of weakness and failure. It perpetuates a culture of competition, of endless one-upsmanship, of self-glorification in victory at the expense of the loser. Are you a man? Prove it. There can only be one winner. We see this in Trump’s bombastic outbursts, in the paradoxical juxtaposition of his constant self-centering and refusal to take responsibility, in the way he talks about others. In a piece for the Boston Globe, Renee Graham notes his constant emasculation of the men around him with jabs like Little Marco, Low-Energy Jeb, and Sloppy Steve. He calls his own Attorney General ‘beleaguered’ and mocks John McCain for being captured in Vietnam. We see this in the Hollywood Access tape, where he proudly toots his alpha male horn and boasts about his sexual prowess and less-than-romantic exploits. I listen to that tape, look at my own bedtime behavior, and my palms begin to sweat. Trump stands atop a pedestal erected on the trampled masculinity of ‘lesser’ men, boys who play along with locker-room talk because they don’t want to surrender their ‘man card,’ give up their membership in the ‘man club.’ Our punishment if we dissent or speak up: belittlement, banishment, even beatings. Our passivity only reinforces the feelings of entitlement that accompany modern masculinity, bolstering those on top and seeding resentment in the lower tiers of the pecking order. And here we unearth the connection between Trump’s brand of manliness and pervasive male violence. Research shows that when our masculinity is called into question we double-down on masculine tropes, overcompensating in our gender expression: we more vocally support violence, homophobic attitudes, male supremacist ideals, even purchasing an SUV. In families and friendships across the country, this response to perceived emasculation manifests as domestic violence or emotional abuse. In a few especially volatile individuals, it comes out as bullets from an AR-15. When you’re raised to be a hammer, everybody looks like a nail. So, we need to stop turning our boys into blunt instruments. We need to teach them to embrace their ‘softer’ side (though, IMHO, being open and emotional requires more backbone than kneejerk retribution). Modern masculinity is toxic for both our boys and our society. If we must have a single definition of ‘what it means to be a man,’ let us posit one that’s healthy, flexible, that allows boys to grow and adapt according to their unique needs. Focus on self-control, not external dominance. Celebrate emotional expression as a gift, not a weakness to be exploited. Dismantle social competition and the cult of the Adonis. Untrap our boys. I leave you with a quote from Mr. Fred Rogers, testifying before the Senate in 1969. It resonates in an especially painful way given the events of the last few weeks. “This is what I give: I give an expression of care, each day, to every child…And I feel that if we…can only make it clear that feelings are mentionable and manageable, we will have done a great service for mental health. I think that it’s much more dramatic that two men could be working out their feelings of anger—much more dramatic than showing something [with] gunfire.” Is this a monumental task? Yes. Is it a panacea for all our social ills? No. But it’s a start.
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